Thursday, November 30, 2006

YAY! I finally got my look together, although I'm still trying to find a decent pair of boots. I guess I'll be fashionably barefoot until that happens. I imagine I’ll be changing the details my image a few times before I’m satisfied. Can anyone recommend a good place to buy hardcore footwear?

I'm very excited to be a part of this performance group and I'm ready to get the ball rolling. Rumour has it that we'll be creating momentary sculptures for one of our future performances (after a few more guerilla appearances at Reuters). Who knows? Anything could happen.

Tran Spire here checking in with the group to touch down and clock some bytes. The peformance the other day was pretty trippy. Documentation trials aside, some weird stuff was ghosting different members of the group. I have added a Vision Portrait over on my blog, one of the many clickity-glitches to occur.

As we were waiting to begin our first performance as Second Front we could sense something was in the code. Here are a couple of images that captured Wirxli FlimFlam caught between forms.

Amazing that things are off the ground. Well when you're an artist, it is always amazing. For anyone who might be interested, as a virtual artist, It's interesting to consider the relationship between my Real Life and my Flesh-Avatar in my Second Physical Life. He (unfortunate that it has to have a fixed gender, unlike me) has flesh-points in Chicago, New York and New Orleans, and he is sometimes an artist, too!

Interesting.

I love to watch the day to day functioning of my Flesh-Avatar when I'm not Rezzed in the world, and quite grateful that there has been a world in the Material for us here in Second Front to play with.

My best to all of you, polygonal or material, and may you enjoy our work at Second Front.

* BREAKING NEWS:OTHER MEMBERS OF THE AVATAR PERFORMANCE ART GROUP, TEA CHENILLE AND ALISE-IBORG ARE NOWHERE TO BE SEEN WITHIN THE VICINITY OF THE REUTERS COMPLEX. MORE DETAILS AS THEY ARRIVE...

* EXCLUSIVE REPORT: ANOTHER PHOTO HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED SHOWING THE 3 MEMBERS OF SECOND FRONT LOOKING SUSPICIOUS OUTSIDE OF THE REUTERS OFFICE. PURPOSE OF VISIT IS UNKNOWN BUT RELIABLE WITNESSES CLAIM THAT THEY HAVE BEEN SITTING ON A PARK BENCH NEAR THE FOUNTAIN OUTSIDE THE REUTERS OFFICE FOR SOME TIME . DETAILS COMING SOON...

*DEVELOPING STORY: THE AVATAR PERFORMANCE ART GROUP CALLED "SECOND FRONT" APPEAR TO HAVE CHOSEN REUTERS AS THEIR VERY FIRST PERFORMANCE VENUE! DETAILS WILL FOLLOW...

* DEVELOPING STORY: RELIABLE SOURCES HAVE CONFIRMED THAT THE AVATAR PERFORMANCE ART GROUP "SECOND FRONT" HAVE ENTERED THE REUTERS BUREAU OFFICE IN SECOND LIFE AND HAVE OCCUPIED THE MAIN LOBBY!

* JUST IN: WIRXLI FLIMFLAM, A MEMBER OF THE PERFORMANCE ART GROUP "SECOND LIFE" HAS BEEN OVERHEARD SAYING THAT THEIR ATTEMPT TO VIDEO-DOCUMENT THIS LANDMARK PERFORMANCE HAS FAILED!

* DEVELOPING STORY:ALLEGATIONS HAS JUST BEEN RAISED THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS ALSO BEHIND FOILED VIDEO-DOCUMENTATION PLOT. NO RELIABLE SOURCE OUTSIDE OF SECOND FRONT HAS YET BEEN VERIFIED. STAY TUNED FOR DETAILS...

* BREAKING NEWS:SECOND FRONT OFFICIALLY ENDS THEIR VERY FIRST PERFORMANCE. TRAN SPIRE, MEMBER OF PERFORMANCE ART GROUP "SECOND FRONT" HAS BEEN CONFIRMED AS SAYING THAT THEY WILL BE BACK SOON TO PERFORM AGAIN IN THE REUTERS OFFICE...DEVELOPING STORY ON ITS WAY...

Greetings Second Front members,I am officially introducing myself as Alise-Iborg. I've spent the last two hours trying on different performance names and found one that I love. Alise is Czech for Alice which references Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (a treasured book of mine and I thought the Looking Glass metaphor is a perfect fit for entering new worlds, in this case, my new Second Life!) and Jeff Noon's Automated Alice (who has a cyborg twin named Celia but I like Alice better -). ALICE is also an acronym for 'Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity" a free natural langage artificial intelligence chat robot!

Anyway, I'm really excited about the creative possibilities of our new performance group and can't wait to join in on the performances. For now, I'm finishing up a semester at the Emily Carr Institute of Art, Design and Media where I am studying intermedia arts and installing a show in their Media Gallery. But I hope to have Alise-Iborg born and flying around in SL by the New Year.

As some of you already know, I have offered to curate the group's first performance series, 'Breaking News". I plan on submitting writings about the performances not only for our blog but also for SLATE and other online and offline publications.

Anyone have any ideas as to what publications/online mags would be a good fit, please let me know. I'm thinking that the writings can contextualize the work within post-humanist frameworks of materiality and embodiment especially in terms of improvisational acts. This will also give us promo to both in and out world audiences. Maybe this will help us secure a grant to buy our own island for that artist commune ;-)

I look forward to meeting all of you in SL but I guess for now, we can blog each other here.

Thanks Wirxli and Tran for setting up this blog and for scouting out our first location!

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Here is a pic of Second Front members, Tran Spire (left) and Wirxli Flimflam (right) meeting in the main lobby of the Reuters building in Second Life to discuss plans for the first Second Front performance series. This provocative pic in the background evokes a known New Media project from the history of interactive digital art (Douglas Davis' Terror and beauty project from 2002).

Douglas Davis, "Kill Not Anyone" (2002).

Other Second Front members will be taking part in this performance series at Reuters. Alise Iborg has agreed to curate and write about this performance series. Other participants will include Man Michinaga and Tea Chenille.

...and here is another angle of the same lobby. This is where we formulated most of our classified performance ideas in the more private IM chat mode.

Here we are exploring one of the stairwells for inspiration. We wanted to know what the space looked like in its entirety so we can ensure that our research allows all Second Front performances to be truly site-specific.

Hmmm... "Tecology" might make a great title for a future Second Front performance series...maybe "T-ecology"? I know that Tran Spire took some postcard shots of us using different angles of our seat position here...maybe new words will form...

Here is another angle that I took but no profound new word combos emerged here. I just wanted to get a close-up of Tran Spire's enigmatic face! Do I see a vacant expression on his face there or is it just his eyes? ;-)

...and here we are exploring the courtyard of the Reuters complex. Perhaps one of the performances in the 1st series will take place outside?

...here we are eavesdropping on a conversation between what appears to be two business executives. One is named Alan Atlanta and is an editor for the In-World News. He claims he has worked for Ted Turner at CNN.

Well bloggers, we (Second Front) will be performing our first event in the series very soon..maybe as early as tomorrow afternoon. Please refresh this blog on a regular basis for more updates, breaking news and developing stories.

My name is Wirxli Flimflam and I am one of the avatar performance artists that is officially part of the Second Front performance collective in Second Life. Second Front mirrors the offline arts collective in Vancouver called the Western Front. I hope you check out this blog for updates about our group performances. Later on tonight, I will be blogging some in-world rehearsal/research pix that documents our very first performance series based on the new Reuters office in Second Life. Please stay tuned for screenshots and embedded videos.

Contributors

Second Front Profile

Second Front is the pioneering performance art group in the online avatar-based VR world, Second Life. Founded in 2006, Second Front quickly grew to its current 8 member troupe that includes Jeremy Owen Turner (Vancouver), Doug Jarvis (Victoria), Tanya Skuce (Vancouver), Gazira Babeli (Italy), Penny Leong Browne (Vancouver), Patrick Lichty (Chicago), Liz Solo (St. Johns) and Scott Kildall (San Francisco). Taking their influences from numerous sources, including Dada, Fluxus, Futurist Syntesi, the Situationist International and contemporary performance artists like Laurie Anderson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Second Front creates theatres of the absurd that challenge notions of virtual embodiment, online performance and the formation of virtual narrative. Created in 2006, they have already performed extensively, including in Vancouver, Chicago, New York, and has been featured in publications including SLate, Eikon, Realtime Arts (Australia), The Avastar (published by Axel-Springer, Germany) and most recently in Exibart (Italy).